ITV bosses yesterday accused the BBC of dirty tricks for letting The Voice over-run by three minutes on Saturday night – as it beat Britain’s Got Talent by a million viewers.

ITV bosses yesterday accused the BBC of dirty tricks for letting The Voice over-run by three minutes on Saturday night – as it beat Britain’s Got Talent by a million viewers.

The BBC show peaked with 11.6million viewers while Simon Cowell’s ITV rival could only muster a high of 10.6million.

After a week of revelations about Cowell’s complicated love life, The Voice managed an average of 9.9million, compared with BGT’s 9.3million. Yesterday, ITV executives rounded on their BBC counterparts after the singing show over-ran by three minutes despite being pre-recorded.

One senior manager tweeted: “Was The Voice tonight live? Surely that can be the only reason BBC1 overran by three minutes … those kind of overruns only normally tend to happen on live shows, don’t they?”

But BBC insiders dismissed that as sour grapes. One source said: “Can they not see the irony that they manufactured this whole situation by bringing their show forward by four weeks and installing the half-hour overlap?

“ITV had the stated aim of wanting to ‘kill off’ The Voice but, now that it’s all backfired, they are trying to blame an overrun of a couple of minutes as the reason their show isn’t going as well as ours.”

Yesterday, it emerged the two “battle round” instalments of The Voice, screened over the weekend, were originally 100 minutes long.

But when ITV threw in the towel and moved BGT back by half an hour, BBC controller Danny Cohen decided to re-edit them to 90 minutes to avoid a 10-minute overlap. The insider explained: “We didn’t want to look as though we were taking their admission of defeat and rubbing their noses in it.

“But the need to lose 10 minutes from each show explains why it over-ran slightly.”

But one ITV source said: “That is horse-s**t. Are they really so inept that they couldn’t manage to cut 10 minutes off and had to settle for seven? Unbelievable.”

Another series to have suffered because of The Voice is Phillip Schofield’s gameshow The Cube.

ITV chiefs shifted it from its Sunday night slot, where it pulled in seven million viewers, and put it up against The Voice – hosted by Schofield’s This Morning sidekick Holly Willoughby.

But the tactic failed, leaving The Cube with just 2.6million on Saturday night.

Last night, The Voice coaches Jessie J, Tom Jones, Will.i.am and Danny O’Donoghue completed cutting the 40 acts down to five each.

The two Scots competitors – John James Newman and Barbara Bryceland – didn’t make it.